


To Mingle Far Friendship is Mingling Bloods

by akathecentimetre



Series: Honorary Holt [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 14:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15798111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Pidge admires, meets, hates, learns, and follows Shiro. It's a Holt thing.





	To Mingle Far Friendship is Mingling Bloods

*

Katie first meets Takashi Shirogane when she is eleven, and then only by hearsay. What she hears is her mother whispering at a furious rate in the kitchen as she clatters by in search of breakfast, already ecstatic that her father is home again so she can throw fruit loops at him in precisely-calculated parabolas; what she hears makes her feet stumble over themselves of their own accord, because her mother is  _angry_  and that’s not generally a thing that happens in Katie’s kitchen.

“Of all the – ” Katie conscientiously stops up her ears for the briefest of instants, because her mother may only swear occasionally but oh boy it  _hurts_  to be within audible range when she does –  “acts of _foolishness_  you could have gotten up to, Samuel bloody Holt. Since when should I have to rely on one of the Garrison’s  _children_  to keep you from falling into a Venusian methane pit?”

“It was only a very little pit,” Sam tries, under his breath, as Katie wriggles past him for a bowl. “Only big enough for – well, look, Colleen, I was hardly in  _that_  much danger. And Shiro is hardly a child. He’s the best the Garrison’s produced in years, perhaps decades – ”

“And I know he’s competent as anything,” Colleen interrupts, her head of steam barreling on unappeased. “That doesn’t mean you should be careless enough as to need his help staying alive when you’re in deep space!”

Katie giggles, one of those strange inappropriate reactions humans have when they’re scared and don’t know how to process it, and Sam’s and Colleen’s eyebrows rise in unison; their little sighs as they come over and sit for the morning ritual of brain teasers sooth her, as does Colleen’s firm kiss to the top of her head, and by the time Matt comes yawning and slouching down to join them she’s moved on to studiously ignoring the idea which sits, fat and pulsing, in the back of her mind that her father has been near death.

She’s twelve when Matt finally joins the science division of the Garrison and her heart starts sparking and seething with jealousy; the second time she hears Shiro’s name is when Matt slinks back home for the weekend after his first two weeks of boot camp, and in amongst the sulking and bruise-massaging he does in his room, alone – except for when Katie is perched at the end of his bed, prodding him with merciless, breathless questions – he peers out from under the ragged edge of his childhood quilt and looks petrified, and says he’ll  _never_  live up to the people he’s supposed to join on a simple Moon shot in six months’ time.

“I mean, they do it to scare us,” he says, staring off into the middle distance, terrified and disgusted with himself with it, and Katie, vibrating with the force of her curiosity, doesn’t know what to say to help him. “All these tall, beautiful geniuses with huge brains and incredible reflexes just –  _wandering_ around. It’s  _humbling_ , Pidge, and they do it on purpose. Stop laughing,” he orders, and Katie can’t help it, because oh, she wants to be with those people so badly that she’s not even worried about how hard it will be to get on their level.

“You have a crush,” she sing-songs, and Matt isn’t even embarrassed about it. He just groans and flops onto his back and says well  _yeah_ , Pidge, who  _wouldn’t_  want to get wrapped up in the likes of Shirogane? And he’s safe to daydream about, because he’s taken, anyway, so what’s the harm, and Katie leaves him alone to stew and goes back to poring over her already-tattered magazine edition of  _Who’s Who of the Galaxy Garrison_. She’s the sort of heathen who writes in library books if it means she can sustain even the briefest important train of thought, and so, with the eagerness of the collector, she tears out each little picture with their stats and pastes them up on her bedroom ceiling in patches amongst the glow-in-the-dark stars and memorizes, and dreams, and wanders around state-of-the-art laboratories in her mind’s eye.

She’s thirteen, and just finishing the independent study in advanced AB calculus her mother designed for her, when Matt – who has advanced in leaps and bounds, and isn’t bragging about it, which is weird, but also something she knows she must aspire to as well – comes home skipping, with their dad just behind him in the doorway, beaming, and says they’re going to  _Kerberos_ , Pidge, oh my  _gods_ , and her mother hesitates for the smallest moment in the arched entryway to the kitchen before she comes forward with her beaming smile and congratulations, swallowing down what Katie recognizes is pure terror. They have a year to prepare, and in that interim Sam finally relents and gives her a full tour of the Garrison, taking her through all the back rooms and offices she never got view of during the public, anodyne offerings.

Sam leans into one particular doorway while they’re there, and Katie, deeply immersed in examining the battered models of spaceships in the staff lounge and sniggering over the fact that yeah, even the World’s Foremost Astroexplorers are  _huge_  dorks, almost misses his invitation to Shiro, sitting out of sight inside, to join them for a celebratory meal at home.

He comes, spick-and-span in his uniform, and man he’s tall. Why is he so tall? And yet Katie feels no apprehension as she peers up at him in the doorway she’s opened to him. She’ll keep the awe – she likes the feeling of awe. It feels like something productive to hold onto, and it’s easy to maintain when the hand he puts out to shake completely envelops hers. She feels childish, and all of a sudden that feels like something she’s missed, like she doesn’t need to grow out of it immediately and curse how time works and how it conspires to hold her back.

“Thank you for having me, Commander.”

“No honorifics in this house, Shiro. That’s an order,” Sam says, clearly thinking he’s funny. Shiro laughs appropriately at the dad joke, looks appropriately uncomfortable the first time he lets the name ‘Sam’ pass his lips, and still insists, without further comment from anyone, on calling Katie ‘miss’ and Colleen ‘ma’am’ for the rest of the evening. It makes her feel so lovingly important that Katie really, really doesn’t mind. Shiro is officially allowed to do or say absolutely anything in her presence, after all, so long as he keeps up the steady stream of lightly-told, deeply-held stories about grabbing her dad back from this or that violent, oozy, sticky end on Venus, or on Mars, or even on the Moon, because for pete’s sake, since when does a highly-respected and -trained scientist almost go out an airlock without his spacesuit just because you can see a new sunspot from here?

“You know, it’s strange,” Shiro says, with his half-guarded, half-smile flitting around his face as he’s sitting across from her in the living room after dinner – he’s been relaxed, now, by Colleen’s cooking and Sam’s insouciance, and she thinks it suits him – “there’s nothing about your father’s career that would suggest he’s a clumsy man, or a forgetful one. Or that he’s careless. Or stubborn beyond reason. But – ”

“ – somehow he’s all of those things at once, constantly,” Katie finishes, and Shiro laughs, and she’s delighted like she’s never quite been by a ‘family friend’ before. It’s like he’s been living here for years, like he’s imbibed via osmosis the rhythms of how the Holt house turns itself over, quietly, efficiently ticking, in quiet summer nights. 

The launch hurts more than she would ever have thought possible. She’d learned to hack for the first time, in the months before, and spent ever more sleepless nights over several weeks memorizing all of the Garrison’s confidential mission goals, all of the spaceship’s schematics, as if she needs to know how she would fix them if something went wrong. It’s her way of feeling in control of the situation, of this crazy, fucked-up, unbelievable truth that is her father and brother jetting off into the unknown for a planned year. She thinks she’s done enough, and then Matt hands her his glasses and looks entirely unlike himself without them, and her mother shrinks three inches inside her clothes and ages ten years in the few days leading up to it – this always happens, she tells Katie in a murmur, not to worry, it’ll pass – and Katie falls apart.

Of course she’s proud. Of course she’s excited. But that’s not  _all_  she is, and in amongst the boastful, jealous congratulations of classmates and teachers who all think  _they_  have been elevated because they know Katie Holt (even the bullies, especially the bullies), it feels like her mother is the only one who understands how the anticipated loneliness is making her want to howl.

Allowing families to see the astronauts the day before the launch is still customary; unlike in the days of Apollo, they don’t have to shout at each other across twenty feet of empty space and barriers for fear of quarantine contamination. Matt feels bony under Katie’s grasping, quivering arms when she hugs him; he gets it from their dad, who feels like a rock, like there’s no way his feet could ever lift off from earth.

Shiro has brought only another kid, a few years older than Katie; he’s dark-haired and huddled sadly in on himself in his Garrison gear and hangs back when Shiro approaches, so Katie doesn’t feel the need to pay him much mind. Shiro looks tired, but he’s also got the same aura hanging around him that the Holts have had for months, that edge of adrenaline just waiting to tip over and fall face-first into adventure.

“I’ll take care of them, Miss Holt,” he says, with a hand hesitating above her shoulder, waiting for her permission to be touched. She’s so grateful that he knows exactly what to say, that he’s said what she needs to hear and  _believes_ , coming from him – she believes in his ability to bring them home more than anyone she’s ever met – that she grabs his palm and squeezes it hard, and manages to break out of her fog for long enough to be strong again.

“You’d better,” she menaces. “I’ve made a lot of threats over this, Shiro. You all owe me.”

“Understood,” he grins, and despite the levity she knows he’s not joking, and that, too, is a comfort.

She drags herself to school bleary-eyed and sick to her stomach, the Monday after the launch. She drags herself there again on the Tuesday on two hours of sleep. Two weeks in, she’s gotten herself back up to an average of six hours, and it’s almost like it’s normal. Three weeks in, when she’s managed to focus back on her research into nanocellulose tech (inspired by far too many repeat watches of  _Star Trek_  in the dark of the night), the crew are finally not-busy enough to spend some time recording messages for those they left behind, and Katie’s mother’s eyes shine as they curl up on the couch together and watch Sam floating, pointing out the gravity generator (“Waste of energy, really, we only use it for exercise hours”), the science station, the immaculate, blinking cockpit. Matt is only just starting to grow out of his hyperactive excitement (“SO COOL, PIDGE, SO COOL”) and his recorded image teases her enough that she stomps upstairs, with her mother’s quiet laughter following her, before she realizes that there’s another message on the Garrison’s audiovisual device addressed to her.

“ _Hello, Katie,_ ” the little holographic Shiro says. He looks completely, utterly deadpan, and Katie’s stomach plummets alarmingly. “ _I need to ask you something very serious... do **all**  Holts snore like this? Because if so, I pity you. And you should invest in adenoidal surgery immediately._” 

His face cracks open with the smile he’d suppressed so well, and Katie is glad no-one is watching her simultaneously laugh and cry with relief. “ _Really. Your father told me to pack noise-cancelling headphones and **didn’t tell me why.**  And your mother is clearly even more of a saint than I already knew. I’d go deaf if I didn’t take precautions, Katie. Do you guys sleep in cork-lined rooms?...”_

She sends a message back detailing, with many demonstrations, just how she snores, burps, and blows raspberries. Especially that last one. It might be the most fun she’s had since the launch, and she’s pretty sure the Garrison will find some way to censor it, but there’s something incredible about the idea that  _that_  particular bundle of radio waves might be tumbling out in space somewhere. Katie Holt, Earth Ambassador Extraordinaire. Farting. 

They go quiet when they reach Kerberos. She understands, because she knows how much work there is to be done, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t hate it. She has school to distract herself with, and decides to spend the time revising, for the umpteenth time, her application essays for the Garrison. She’s weeks away from her fourteenth birthday, the cutoff for the youngest – and most brilliant – cadets (it takes all sorts, she knows; Matt was nineteen, after all), and she doesn’t intend to waste any time getting in, even for the simplest reason of wanting to be in a place where her father and Matt will be daily topics of conversation, to widen her circle of feeling and understanding beyond her patient, brilliant, suffering mother.

There is a long existing litany of space-exploration PR disasters. She knows, from her history books, that NASA often scrambled to contain news of mishaps and death and the Problems of 13. She’s read sociological accounts of wives manipulated and children expected to suck it up and fathers held up to the media as Real Men’s Men when they were anything but, and ugh, what was the worth in that, anyway?

Even so. In retrospect, she’ll recognize that the news networks telling her her father and brother are dead well before the Garrison manages to get any personnel to their door is a fuck-up for the  _ages_.

Her mother looks so small, and the house is so dark and empty, and Katie’s mind explodes. It ricochets, searching for answers, calculating, exploring all options, not wanting to resort to the Occam’s Razor of cable TV’s assumption. She needs something to blame. She needs a  _reason_ , damn it, she needs an explanation, she needs –

_Pilot error_ , the newscaster says.

_Pilot error._

_Pilot._

The betrayal wars inside her with the rage, and she decides then and there that she will never, in her life, ever hate anyone so much as she hates Takashi Shirogane.

*

**TBC**

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Shakespeare's _Winter's Tale_. More to come, including side-stories. Thanks for reading!


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